New Mexico

What, you thought I'd completely forgotten to write about our trip to New Mexico??

So here's the dish....

My mom, her sister, and my sister-in-law, all drove down to meet my sister and I on Friday night. We had a quick dinner of ham sandwiches and chips, then loaded up in my van, along with Alex, and headed out. We didn't leave until 8pm, so we knew it was going to be a long night!! We drove, took some breaks, stretched our legs, all that jazz. One place we stopped at to use the restroom had a sign posted "restrooms for customers only" - so we ended up staying 45 minutes while we ate our mozarella sticks and mushroom poppers. This was around 3am, so Alex, after having slept for part of the drive, was now wide awake, running around the restaurant like a wild child. We finally pulled into my aunt's driveway around 6am (our time, it was 5am NM time). Alex (he did fall back to sleep after our "breakfast" at 3am) did not go back to sleep after we got settled into the Fifth Wheel. I think I got about 2 hours of off and on sleep, then decided to take him outside and have a look around. I thought that would be a great idea, so his playing wouldn't wake the other sleepers in the Fifth Wheel...but as soon as we stepped outside, the dogs started going bonkers!! They would.not.stop.barking! So that ended up waking the rest of the people!!

There was my cousin and her two children who had driven in from CO, my two aunts (on my dad's side) and their husbands, and one of the husband's sister and her husband. Make sense? Anyhoo, there were a lot of people. After breakfast we walked toward the mesa's and looked around for some old Native American artifacts. I picked up a few cool rocks to bring home (Ajay is into rocks right now), and one of my aunts found part of an actual arrowhead! (She has a lot of cool things she's found over the last year of living down there.) Later that evening, I gave a Norwex presentation, we had dinner, then got started on the psychic part of the trip. We all said our prayers for guidance and to keep any bad spirits away. We only spent a couple hours on this, as we were all so tired and had to wake up early the next morning. Sunday morning we headed out for The Sanctuary at Chimayo, a 3 hour drive from my aunts house, and were a little late for mass. After mass we looked around, got some holy dirt, bought a few souveniers, then headed back! We grabbed lunch at some local burger place on the way. Once back at my aunts, we went to her neighbors for dinner (the only neighbor within sight of her place!). And that was that! We left the next day. We got a later start than we wanted, but it is hard to get so many people (most of whom have the gift of gab, myself included) on the road. We stopped in Tucumcari and picked up some more souveniers for loved ones, then drove on. I would say it took a good 12 hours to arrive at my doorstep. Alex did GREAT. I can't imagine a 19 month old acting better than he did under the same circumstances. He did get mad when we stopped for gas and he wasn't allowed to get out of his carseat, but can you blame him??
As expected, I took loads of pictures. I've assembled some into a slideshow for you all. Enjoy!..........Okay, I can't get the slideshow to load, so I'll just post this for now, and hopefully I'll get the slideshow up later!